Bouchard Geneviève, Saint-Aubin Jean
Professor, School of Psychology, Université de Moncton, Moncton, New Brunswick.
Can J Psychiatry. 2014 Sep;59(9):480-6. doi: 10.1177/070674371405900904.
Building on previous work on the role of attention deficits associated with the regulation of executive control in psychiatric disorders, we examine whether these attention deficits are related to an interpersonal disturbance, the experience of divorce.
Attentional capacities of 95 randomly selected couples from the general population were measured with a well-established task, the Attentional Network Task, which assesses the efficiency of 3 attention networks (that is, alerting, orienting, and executive control). Among the 190 participants, 32 had experienced a divorce in the past. ANCOVAs were used to compare divorced people in marital or cohabiting unions with people in first unions in their performance on this purely cognitive task.
Our findings indicate that divorced people who are currently living in a cohabiting relationship show significantly lower executive control than other adults living as couples, after controlling for sex, age, income, and education. This subgroup of divorced people not only exhibit greater difficulty in responding to some stimuli while ignoring irrelevant ones but also manifest cognitive deficits in conflict resolution.
This study highlights the links between attention and the long-term maintenance of intimate relationships. Our results may have important implications for the identification of people at risk for divorce.
基于先前关于注意力缺陷与精神疾病中执行控制调节作用的研究，我们探讨这些注意力缺陷是否与人际困扰即离婚经历有关。
使用一项成熟的任务——注意力网络任务，对从普通人群中随机选取的95对夫妇的注意力能力进行测量，该任务评估三个注意力网络（即警觉、定向和执行控制）的效率。在190名参与者中，有32人过去经历过离婚。采用协方差分析来比较处于婚姻或同居关系中的离婚者与处于首次婚姻关系中的人在这项纯认知任务上的表现。
我们的研究结果表明，在控制了性别、年龄、收入和教育因素后，目前处于同居关系的离婚者在执行控制方面显著低于其他已婚夫妇。这一离婚者亚组不仅在忽略无关刺激的同时对某些刺激做出反应时表现出更大困难，而且在冲突解决方面也存在认知缺陷。
本研究突出了注意力与亲密关系长期维持之间的联系。我们的结果可能对识别有离婚风险的人群具有重要意义。
